“Varanasi seems like a really queer metropolis to me,” says artist Debashish Paul, talking of his adopted residence the place he presently lives and works since ending his Masters’ in sculpture from the Banaras Hindu College in 2021.
For his first solo exhibition, A Thousand Years of Dreaming, at Kolkata’s Emami Artwork, he channels “the playfulness, colors and ecstasy of dwelling in Varanasi — its open landscapes, its crowded alleys, its grand ghats — its personal particular type of queerness” into nonetheless efficiency photographs, sketches and sculptures.
Artist Debashish Paul
| Photograph Credit score:
Particular Association
“I’ve seen the convenience of boys holding arms, bathing collectively, and celebrating one another’s our bodies within the River Ganges, they usually aren’t burdened, they’re free with each other,” he says, throughout our phone dialog. For him, these males don’t want “to translate their affections for one another” by means of a layer of queerness. And for Paul, his efficiency artwork follow permits for him to “slip” into his personal sense of queerness.
It appears, his follow has at all times been a approach for him to slide, slide and steal a path into himself. Rising up in Phulia in West Bengal’s Nadia District, the birthplace of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, one of many vital saints of the Bhakti motion, he remembers at all times being a part of the jathras or temple gala’s in his village.
“As a queer little one, I discovered myself continually inquisitive about my physique, and was drawn to bop, motion, and theatre. From my college days, I’ve participated within the mythological dramas that passed off at these jathras,” he says. “There I noticed different boys and males dressing up as gods and goddesses. Round this time, I additionally discovered myself turning into fascinated with dressing up as a lady. So, I’d play solely the feminine roles in these performs.”
‘Anatomy of a Dream’
| Photograph Credit score:
Courtesy: Debashish Paul
Inside a efficiency
For Paul, these probabilities at embodying the flesh and bones of one other has at all times been “a liberating playground for his creativeness”. Occupying these occasions of non secular and ritualistic rigmarole, he may “like Krishna turn out to be Mohini, or personify Shiva-Parvati as Ardhanareeshwara, half-man and half-woman”.
Whereas the method of turning into these characters — making use of the make-up or placing on the costumes — was like an thrilling tour into himself, over time, he additionally started to note that among the different males had been taking the same pleasure within the performative points of those rituals, too. He started to see different queer males of his village, who had been both married, had been fathers or didn’t explicitly establish as such, “appeared to disclose themselves” whereas remaining hidden throughout the remainder of the time. “I realised on these jathras that one may turn out to be something: a person may turn out to be a god, a lady, a fowl or an animal,” he remembers of his early epiphany. And his efficiency follow and the exhibition house enable this comparable shift for him, observes Mario D’Souza, director of programmes and exhibitions on the Kochi Biennale Basis and resident curator at HH Artwork Areas in Goa, who curated this exhibition and has intently labored with Paul for over two years. “Apparently, within the exhibition house, he [Paul] is an overtly queer man speaking about love and worship. I feel that is what his efficiency physique permits him to be — it permits him to be queer in public,” says Mario talking to one of many fixed themes of their conversations over these years.
The movie work Hazaro Saalon ka Sapna (whose tough translation lends its title to the exhibition) grounds Paul’s present. In it, he pulls from all of those private influences to touch upon queer togetherness, its difficulties, its daring and its drama. “I come from a decrease middle-class household and we reside in a village. My boyfriend comes from comparable circumstances, too,” he says. “Each our households aren’t educated, they don’t learn about queerness or homosexuality. And so they don’t learn about my id both.” Now, they’re each 30, and are going through household stress to get married to ladies.
A efficiency by Debashish Paul
| Photograph Credit score:
Particular Association
“I’ve seen different homosexual males who’ve given in and married ladies however they aren’t capable of have fun their lives. They’re sure to a societal construction that they didn’t need. That is one thing I’m resisting as a result of we love one another,” he provides. As at all times, in questioning how he can escape from his actuality, Paul turned to his efficiency artwork follow. In Hazaro Saalon ka Sapna, he initiatives this dream of queer marriage or togetherness. “Quite than specializing in the unfulfilled wishes of a queer particular person, I questioned: what would the fulfilled goals of a queer particular person’s need to arrange residence to make a household seem like?” So as to reply this query, Paul drew from his childhood reminiscences of faith and rituals. In addition to his life in Varanasi the place he has discovered “a freedom and philosophy that goes past the physique”.
Says D’Souza, “Paul isn’t studying Queer Idea, he’s actually responding to issues from his experiences from a quite simple place; it’s supremely intuitive and really auto-narrative. His work thinks about shape-shifting, about mutating, about turning into issues that you’re — but it surely’s additionally about masking, hiding, and concealment” and the tensions between “Is he popping out? Or is he hiding below new types of adornment?”
‘The Historic Dream 2’
| Photograph Credit score:
Courtesy: Debashish Paul
Who’s afraid of who?
Paul doesn’t search to glorify together with his use of non secular and ritualistic symbols, mostly used to adorn his costumes (that stand as sculptures within the exhibition) or the composition of his storytelling. As an alternative, he radically employs these supplies—the detritus of rituals, resembling fabric, cowrie shells, threads, temple jewelry, and different decorations—and childhood reminiscences of jathras to anoint his personal queer physique as sacred, too. And D’Souza reminds us of the putting significance of this symbolism in Paul’s work. “It really works in direction of instilling a way of holiness into the queer physique that’s invisible in Banaras and the society round him and his companion, and the opposite queer males that he is aware of who aren’t out, who’re additionally closeted too,” he says. For D’Souza, Paul’s work “recalibrates his experiences by means of the sacred to make deity-like figures with out alluding to anyone factor—in a approach creating his personal pagan gods”.
A efficiency by Debashish Paul
| Photograph Credit score:
Particular Association
His work can be grounded in moments of self-doubt and societal dissonance that plague queer individuals, proven extra straight by means of his drawings of creatures—fantastical, fabulous, and fractured. “These creatures emerge from the moments of loneliness brought on by society’s gaze on our bodies like mine. Rising up in a panorama of hate and disgust, typically I felt like an alien,” Paul says.
The drawings “are a mirrored image of the instances I really feel like a bizarre, whimsical creature. And I’ve come to see that there’s magnificence, there’s horror, there’s an otherworldliness to them very like my very own expertise of being queer in our society”. For him, these creatures aren’t meant to scare “however like comparable creatures in temple structure”, they coax us into imagining who is de facto afraid of who.
The exhibition runs until October 26 at Emami Artwork Gallery, Kolkata.
The writer is a Bengaluru-based poet and author.
Printed – October 18, 2024 03:22 pm IST
